In a conventional interface between a read/write channel (RWC) and a storage device controller, such as a hard disk controller (HDC), the read and write operations are typically controlled by the HDC. However, in systems with data encryption, the data is encoded before writing to the HDC or decoded after reading from the HDC. The encoding and decoding steps may introduce significant latency into the RWC. Due to the potentially long latency periods introduced into the channel, the read and write media controls from the HDC cannot be aligned with data transferred from and to the RWC.